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 Why watching TV drama is good for your brains
On a cold January night, the prospect of ditching your resolution to get fit - or read the complete works of Tolstoy - and putting your feet up in front of a good TV crime drama can prove irresistible. But if you feel guilty about lounging on the sofa, don’t. Because watching a powerful mystery is actually good for you. That’s neuroscientific fact. Whether it’s a gritty Nordic noir box set, the latest series of Broadchurch or the small screen thriller Fortitude that starts on Thursday, telly of this kind provides an excellent workout for your brain. I’m a neuroscientist at Durham University, and the research in my field affirms this. The best TV crime dramas build suspense over a number of episodes. They challenge viewers to pay attention to complicated stories, including red herrings, and to remember them from episode to episode.
In other words, they provide great stimulation for the brain, which in turn helps keep it healthy, as the human brain needs to be kept active. In fact, when you deprive it of stimulation it reacts very badly.
Research shows that when people are put in an artificial situation with no sensory stimulation, their brains take only 30 hours to become so distressed they start stimulating themselves by hallucinating. When people come out of those isolation experiments and are asked to undertake reasoning and memory tests, they perform worse than previously. The more you tax your brain, the sharper it becomes. And when you watch complex TV drama, you really tax it. Almost all the visual regions in the brain are activated, starting with the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe, where the images are first analysed.
The inferior temporal lobe kicks in to recognise objects, and the parietal lobe takes care of spatial attention – that is, separating out the important parts of the image from the background. There’s also a particular part of the brain, the fusiform face area, which recognises the characters’ faces - crucial for dramas that introduce a sometimes bewildering number of suspects. The Wernicke’s area of the left brain is deployed to understand the show’s script, while the same area in the right-hand side of the brain analyses the tone of voice and its musicality to decode the emotion conveyed. Indeed, where crime dramas score extra brain exercise points over other television genres is in their complexity and high levels of emotion. Understanding Beth Latimer’s grief in Broadchurch, or Sarah Lund’s isolation in The Killing, involves a complicated interplay of brain regions working together (loosely called the limbic system).
The memory area of the hippocampus, meanwhile, helps us recall what happened to the characters
in the previous episode. When the limbic system is stimulated in the right way, it can also trigger the release of brain chemicals such as serotonin (which helps us feel happy) and dopamine (which helps us feel rewarded). Serotonin and dopamine are crucial to a healthy brain: it is these chemicals that are often depleted in those suffering from depression.
So if you figure out who the murderer is, you won’t just feel smug - your brain chemistry might also improve. To reach this point, you will have had to remember who’s who, how they relate to each other and what has happened already, all of which requires the working memory and higher reasoning centres of the frontal cortex. Then there’s the background music. Chris Chibnall, the creator of Broadchurch, has said many of his plot cues are signalled to the audience through the music.
In many other series too (as well as films), the score helps build the suspense, which is surely the key ingredient of all successful crime dramas - and one to which the human brain responds strongly. A recent academic paper described an experiment in which participants were shown scenes from an old TV show directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Those they rated “highly suspenseful” generated greater activity in the
frontal cortex and parietal cortex of their brains. These coordinated areas of the brain are responsible for higher executive function – planning and organising, as well as managing our time and attention. Which is just as well, because attention is essential if the rich flow of information is to stimulate our cognitive awareness. But we have a limited capacity to pay attention, and brain blinks, such as breaking off to check text messages or social media, divert valuable mental resources. So for the best brain workout during your favourite crime show, give it your full attention - and save tweeting about it for later.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk by Dr. Amanda Ellison
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The subject of this lesson is 'Thrillers'.
Grammar
Song: Cardigan Weather
Task
What have you learnt in this period?
